This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of the art that may be related to various aspects of the present invention. The following discussion is intended to provide information to facilitate a better understanding of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that statements in the following discussion are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
The introduction of broadband access technologies—linked with attractive charging models and new services—and the success of the smart phones have implied more network usage by end-subscribers. Although solutions increasing the speed in the access network have been defined during the last years (e.g. HSPA, LTE), the network usage growth cannot be fully taken by such solutions. That is critical especially for the radio network, at least in the short-term. Due to that fact, telecommunications operators shall be ready to manage possible congestion situations in the access networks.
3GPP Rel-8 (and onwards) specifications propose an end-to-end congestion control mechanism based on admission control and resource reservation principles. Those principles imply that before establishing a new bearer for specific service flows, the network estimates if there is enough bandwidth in the network for setting the required Quality of Service “QoS”. That implies the usage of Guaranteed-Bit-Rate (GBR) bearers (an IP Connectivity Access Network “IP-CAN” bearer with reserved bit-rate resources) for QoS demanding services together with priority handling. This is an end-to-end. (e2e) congestion handling mechanism, where the congestion handling is enforced in the radio side.
The e2e congestion control approach commented in previous paragraph requires a complete network upgrade. Due to the cost of such task, Operators are also considering other alternatives. One of such alternatives is the introduction of information about network load in the policy decision process. The basis for that is to add congestion status per location area available to Policy and Charging Control “PCC” architecture, thus given such information as input for the policy decision in a Policy and Charging control Rules Function “PCRF”. The problem then is how (and where) the PCRF can get such network load information. Trying to solve such problem, some operators and vendors are proposing to use a direct connection from the PCRF towards a congestion database (it can be seen as an ad-hoc implementation of 3GPP Sp reference point for congestion status per location area information).
Nevertheless, this solution does not enable a real-time congestion control. The congestion analysis, which is based on the counters and statistics available in the network Operation and Maintenance (OAM) system (e.g. the OSS), requires some processing tune (15 minutes in most of the systems). So when the PCRF has the congestion status available, such information is not useful for taking an adequate policy decision (congestion conditions can change very fast).
The following problems have been identified for the existing solutions:
3GPP admission control and resource reservation procedure:                It requires a complete e2e network update.        It requires important system integration effort and cost.        It requires terminals support.        It is a high-cost solution, not addressing a market-need in a flat-credit situation.        
Policy decisions based on network load:                Not real time solution. The congestion status is available when maybe the congestion situation is over. Maybe the processing time for getting the congestion status information can be reduced, but impacting the characteristics and performance of the whole network.        